"The most intense Christmas ever". Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty
One of the simple joys of having a bundle of church keys is that you can wander around in the building when others have gone home. Over lockdown, it has been my retreat from noisy children, an office, a sanctuary and a place to think. It is also where I get to say things out loud, testing thoughts out on the silence. “Please, help me!” I said to the altar the other night, more in anger than in expectation. I was surprised how it came out. Too direct to feel like a prayer, it sounded more of a demand I suppose. Or rather, the kind of demand that feels the presence of defeat at the door. News was just in that the husband of one of my congregation had just been killed by Covid. Another death in the parish.
Pretty much everything is shut round here. For months, now, the local doctor’s surgery has become a no-go zone: its doors bolted against the plague, its website a forbidding maze of alternatives. Tesco and the pharmacy – now heroically taking on the de facto role of the doctor’s surgery – remain defiantly open, spots of lights in the darkness.
Should the church close too? Is the short term emotional comfort of “Once in Royal David’s City” really worth it if we are risking people’s lives? But if we join the doctor’s surgery and close our doors, what does that say about our own perception of what we do here? “Can you imagine any activity less deserving of priority?” was Richard Dawkins response to the Prime Minister’s announcement that collective worship can continue, even in tier 4. It seems that quite a number of clergy agree with him. Many churches will be closed this Christmas.
Will we be judged as having abandoned people in their hour of need? It’s a harsh question, unfair perhaps. But as Philip Ziegler notes in his seminal study of the Black Death, the clergy “were deemed not to have risen to the level of their responsibilities, to have run away in fear or in search of gain, to have put their own skins first and the souls of their parishioners a bad second”. That, too, was unfair. Ziegler himself notes that parish clergy were more likely to die of the plague than the population in general.
But the perception stuck. And the relationship of trust between the clergy and their people was changed forever, and so the church emerged from the plague “with diminished credit”. He continues “the contempt of contemporaries may not have been justified but it was still to cost the Church dear over the next decades”. And fair or not, I fear the same may well be true this time.
But is that really my worry, that we will be perceived to have abandoned our people? Shouldn’t I just accept this reputational risk as a price worth paying for the protection of my congregation from this monstrous pestilence? So what if the church emerges with diminished credit, isn’t this precisely the kind of sacrifice we are called upon to make? These questions weigh heavily upon me, but they are not the only questions.
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